Rosalie Yu: Ritual of Habits

Sugar has a rich history in colonial exploitation and the still-life artistic genre, and, for Yu, this is what inspired Ritual of Habits. Beginning in January 2016, Yu catalogued every dessert in her diet as a 3D image and transfigured them into digital memories using photogrammetry.* With habitual and mechanical procedures to document, confront, and reflect on her sugar-frosted fantasies, Ritual of Habits transcends the private experience of indulgence. The virtual environment becomes a portal for sensing residual colonial power that has continued to exercise control over the centuries.

*Photogrammetry: Photogrammetry is a method of 3D-scanning that takes multiple photos from different angles to generate a hyperrealistic 3D model of an object. Typically, this process is achieved in professional photography studios with multiple cameras. Yu used her smartphone to generate 3D models of every dessert she ate over the last year and a half. Smartphones enabled a spontaneous, on-location image capture of sweet indulgences.